The Writings of John Burroughs — Volume 05: PepactonBurroughs, John
History
The Writings of John Burroughs — Volume 05: Pepacton
Burroughs, John
Natural history -- Outdoor books
The last-named, horned bladderwort, is perhaps the most fragrant
flower we have. In a warm, moist atmosphere, its odor is almost
too strong. It is a plant with a slender, leafless stalk or scape
less than a foot high, with two or more large yellow hood or helmet
shaped flowers. It is not common, and belongs pretty well north,
growing in sandy swamps and along the marshy margins of lakes and
ponds. Its perfume is sweet and spicy in an eminent degree. I
have placed in the above list several flowers that are
intermittently fragrant, like the hepatica, or liver-leaf. This
flower is the earliest, as it is certainly one of the most
beautiful, to be found in our woods, and occasionally it is
fragrant. Group after group may be inspected, ranging through
all shades of purple and blue, with some perfectly white, and no
odor be detected, when presently you will happen upon a little
brood of them that have a most delicate and delicious fragrance.
The same is true of a species of loosestrife growing along streams
and on other wet places, with tall bushy stalks, dark green leaves,
and pale axillary yellow flowers (probably European). A handful of
these flowers will sometimes exhale a sweet fragrance; at other
times, or from another locality, they are scentless. Our evening
primrose is thought to be uniformly sweet-scented, but the past
season I examined many specimens, and failed to find one that was
so. Some seasons the sugar maple yields much sweeter sap than in
others; and even individual trees, owing to the soil, moisture, and
other conditions where they stand, show a great difference in this
respect. The same is doubtless true of the sweet-scented
flowers. I had always supposed that our Canada violet--the tall,
leafy-stemmed white violet of our Northern woods--was odorless,
till a correspondent called my attention to the contrary fact. On
examination I found that, while the first ones that bloomed about
May 25 had very sweet-scented foliage, especially when crushed in
the hand, the flowers were practically without fragrance. But as
the season advanced the fragrance developed, till a single flower
had a well-marked perfume, and a handful of them was sweet indeed.
A single specimen, plucked about August 1, was quite as fragrant as
the English violet, though the perfume is not what is known as
violet, but, like that of the hepatica, comes nearer to the odor of
certain fruit trees.
It is only for a brief period that the blossoms of our sugar maple
are sweet-scented; the perfume seems to become stale after a few
days: but pass under this tree just at the right moment, say at
nightfall on the first or second day of its perfect inflorescence,
and the air is laden with its sweetness; its perfumed breath falls
upon you as its cool shadow does a few weeks later.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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